Quick and Easy Welding Table

I recently took one of two car lifts out of my garage to make room for expansion of the machine shop sickness. The good news is that I picked up a large garage stall of floor space, and the bad news was that the lift had been a convenient work surface for many projects including welding. Part of this new push would involved getting things organized and fabricating some custom work surfaces. That meant I needed a convenient place to weld, hence this approach. I'm of the opinion that you can never have too much work surface nor too many drawers, so the idea of building a welding table on top of a rolling tool chest really appealed to me. Here is a brief photo essay of the project:

The idea was to use firebricks to insulate the tool cabinet from heat together with an additional stand-off bracket to increase the air gap...

The stand-offs were made from pieces of 4x4 square tubing that I sectioned on my chop saw...

Brother Dave on the Tig welder. We each did half the welds. Hard to keep in practice for Tig!

Here is the finished table. The square tubing sticking out the front was a last-minute idea. I'm going to mount my vise on there so it is removable as needed. I have a hunch that I'll come up with other things to insert in that "holster" that will be helpful. We'll see!